


author our own disasters

by evil bunny wolf (evil_bunny_king)



Series: you make me feel so criminal [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Bloody Kisses, F/M, Feels, Gun fights, Hot Cocoa, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season 2, Reconciliation, Snark, Violence (of course), slowest of burns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-06-02 09:11:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6560539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/evil%20bunny%20wolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank Castle's flesh is a litany to disaster.</p><p>--</p><p>Karen and Frank meet again for the first time since that final showdown on the rooftop. It doesn't go as planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ejunkiet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ejunkiet/gifts).



> Title from the amazing song ['The Past is a Grotesque Animal'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7vTHrNCVbY) by Of Montreal and The Lost Trees.

She gets lucky. It’s a chance in a thousand- the only odds she’s likely to win in her journalism career of indeterminate-length, but as much as Foggy and even the ‘devil of Hell’s Kitchen’ would disagree with her, there are worse ways and worse people to spend her luck on.

She stumbles after a tenuous lead that takes her on two wrong turns and a detour into an abandoned factory and that luck finds her: in the range of her weak flashlight and between the hulking glower of machinery, in the bloodied form of Frank Castle.

Frank is slumped against a disintegration of cogs, almost small in the halo of her flashlight.

She kneels by his side. Clasps one of his large, too cold hands in hers even as she feels for breath and pulse with the other, touch fluttering before it finally settles on the mangled pulp of his cheek. 

The muscle twitches beneath her fingers. He stirs, or perhaps he was already awake- he opens his eyes, irises washed black in the weak light.

They are as dark as she remembers.

“Jesus Christ- you,” comes a whisper, hoarse and disbelieving - and there is a clatter as the gun he was raising to her head falls back limply to his side.

It has been a long time since she’d seen him in the flesh, let alone spoken to him - and by god how she remembers that final conversation – but Frank Castle could almost have not changed at all.

“Yes, me, Frank,” she finds herself saying. And then, nonsensical as it is, “You’ve been busy.”

She lets her hand slip from his cheek. It settles it on his shoulder, instead – more neutral ground – and she rolls herself back on her heels, examining him in the light of the torch.

There is a catalogue of new nicks and gashes rent through his military armour - scars upon scars, crimson spreading dark across the white blazon on his shirt – but as her luck would have it, he is still alive.

He snorts, and makes an abortive movement, as if he’s going to twist his head but thinks the better of it, and his hand shifts instead, sliding out of her grasp.

He braces it on the ground beside him. Bunches it in a fist, his knuckles pressing into the dust.

“What in Christ’s name are you doing here?”

Doing my job, she could tell him.

“I could ask you the same thing, Frank,” she says instead. “What are _you_ doing here?”

The edge in her tone reveals more than she wants it to - her tiredness, her exasperation, the weeks spent chasing false leads and red herrings and a lingering fear that is - not of him, still not of him, although there is a small voice that says perhaps it should be.

But he’s watching her still. Blood trickles past his eyes, seeping from the gash above his hair line and washing his sclera red, and he watches her and takes her in, from the loose, nondescript clothing to her running shoes, and she can tell that he _knows_.

Oh, he is so damn _astute._

“You’re a human pincushion, Frank,” she tells him, as if that could distract him, and pulls her hands away entirely. For the sake of the torch, she tells herself, but he isn’t fooled and she doesn’t think she’d have been, either. “I don’t think you’re in a position to judge. What did you do, fall through a window?”

She picks at his jacket, pulling away pieces of glass that glitter in the torchlight and in the remains of his hair and he does laugh, at that, his gaze shifting away (at last) to the man-sized hole in the ceiling above.

“Yeah, I fell through a window,” he confirms, “and a few other things, ‘asides. Seem to have shaken off my tail, though.”

 “You’re being followed?”

His gaze slides back to hers and the corner of his mouth twists up, as if it should be obvious. “ _Was_ being followed. Lost them. You’d be looking at a corpse here otherwise.”

A shiver traces down her spine at that and as if he catches the direction of her thoughts, his expression smooths back into that stoic mask of his: blank, closed.

She could hit him if he wasn’t already beaten to within an inch of life.

“And yet you’re still alive and kicking,” she tries instead, tapping the end of the flashlight on her knee, and it works – the smile return, if ironically.

"Sure am."

She bends forward to gently pull his coat open, looking for more blood, but the fact remains: they're running out of time.

Her source be damned (and he probably was dead, considering - oh _Christ_ ), they couldn't stay here.

“What's the prognosis, doc?”

She ignores him, ignores the way he stiffens, ever so slightly, as she leans forward to see better, and looks him over. The head wound - the head wound looks  _bad._  The skin's ruptured, glass and dirt caught at the edges, but when she reaches out to peer closer he turns his head away, even as he winces.

She settles her hands in her lap with a twist of her mouth.

“How’s your head?” she asks, pointedly, and again there is that rasp of a laugh.

“What do you think?” he asks, and he would’ve quirked his head as he said it, she thinks, if he’d been able to. In that sarcastic, punk-ass way of his. “Hurts like a bitch.”

“Anything else hurt like a bitch?”

He does tilts his head at that, despite how painful it must be. “’M not bleeding out quite yet, no.”

“Good.” She looks away, and down; catches a glimpse of the symbol emblazoned across his chest and now bared to the light and then swallows. She gets herself to think. Where could they go? “Good.” She looks up. “Think you can move?”

Another twist of a smile. “You gonna help me if I can’t?”

She hisses a breath through her teeth. “Don’t be an asshole, Frank.”

He snorts, but when she reaches for him this time, offering him her arm, he doesn’t shy away.

“Yeah, ‘might need help,” he admits, and between the two of them they pick him up off the floor, eventually placing him on his feet.

His breathing is harsh and short as he finds his balance, braced between the machine and her offered shoulder, and she waits him out, despite the press of her pulse in her throat. She peers into the gloom.

“You have a place we can go?” she asks, but he doesn’t respond, his head still in his hands, and if she listens closely, she thinks she hears him counting.

After a few minutes pass, he forces himself upright and pushes away the hand she offers. He wraps an arm around himself and squares himself on his feet, his expression stony once more, and she knows what he is going to say before he opens his mouth.

“You should- You should go. You don’t need to- you can go.”

She’s heard it before. Seen him withdraw like this, slide back, letting her go like the slow, unsteady breath he heaves from his lungs - but when he tries to step away he stumbles, swaying like a man drugged, and this time she moves after him.

God be damned if she’s going to leave him like this again.

Ignoring his mutters of protest, she reaches for his arm – reaches again as he jerks away, almost sending himself stumbling backwards into the machinery.

“Don’t be an idiot, Frank," she hisses, staring him down. “You can hardly stand. How the hell do you expect to get out of here?”

“Jesus Christ, you don’t know when to leave it be, do you?" He's half-collapsed but even in the half-light she can see his incredulity, the annoyance bunched with the sweat on his brow. "Go. Go, for chrissakes, I’ll be-" he gestures ineffectively - pathetically - not looking at her; "I’ll be fine.”

She takes the few deliberate steps back into his line of sight.

“I’m here, Frank," she says, firmly. "I’m already involved. Like it or not, so either you let me help you, or I’ll stand here and watch you crawl out of here - because either way, we’re getting out together.”

He stares at her. His head wound is bleeding again – a fresh streak of red that runs down his cheek, matting through his hair - but his gaze is unyielding.

She stares right back.

His jaw ticks. Tightens.

And then he looks down, wincing at the movement, muttering something that sounds like ‘stubborn as hell’ and ‘jesus fucking christ’ before glancing up again, eyes washed black in the torchlight.

“Alright,” he says, and she smiles - she smiles _wide_.

He casts his gaze to the heavens as if asking for mercy - but she swear she sees something ease in the line of his mouth too.

“Alright," he says again, tired and conceding, and then he forces himself upright, extending himself gingerly, carefully from the machine. "I have a place, 's not far from here. You can walk me there. And then you leave, you got that?”

“Sure.” She nods, releasing her arms (she hadn’t realised she’d been gripping them so tightly) - and this time when she takes a step towards him he stays put.

He is silent as she careful levers his arm around her; as she locks one of her hands in his to keep them steady and slides the other around his back, bracing her shoulder against his armpit.

“Where to?” she asks, once they’re settled, and she feels his huff of breath shudder against his ribs.

“Intersection of 57th. Second building down. Basement,” he responds, and then they set off, making their way back towards the entrance, a hobbled, hulking thing that casts grotesques against the walls.

They pause only to retrieve his gun. Karen protests but he ignores her, digging in his heels until she agrees to retrieve it, and his fingers linger over the grip as they walk, his eyes narrowed against the darkness, and watching, always watching.

They make it the five blocks to the address before all hell breaks loose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to mention I HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT HK GEOGRAPHY I'm sorry, it's all going to be wrong.


	2. Dead Man Walking

It occurs to her, as they make their slow way from doorway to doorway down the deserted early-morning streets, that she hadn’t hesitated before helping him.  
  
A long time has passed since she’s last - known, Frank Castle. Months of unclaimed executions, murmurs of resurrection; months since the last time bullets had exploded over her head and yet-  
  
And yet.  
  
The man limping at her side is flesh and blood.

“So what is it this time, Frank?” She tries, as if to lighten the mood, as if to hide the way her hand is trembling as she clutches his wrist to hold the warm weight of his arm steady.

She’s afraid. Of course she is: she has no idea who is after him or why, but given his history – given their history, bloody as it is - she knows that whatever it is, it sure as hell isn’t over yet. Frank Castle is a dangerous man, and he hunts dangerous people.

He doesn’t respond, at first. They step into the next doorway and he tips his head slightly, gingerly, to scan the windows and roofs around them, his eyes washed umber by the morning light.

His fingers flutter at his side. Tip-tap, along the butt of his gun.  
  
“Do you want me to answer that?” he says at last, blinking at the sunlight.  
  
It galls her that he won’t even look at her as he says it.  
  
“Yes, Frank,” she says, jaw tightening around the words despite herself. “If someone is chasing us, I think have a goddamn right to know who it is.”  
  
He snorts, their proximity shaking the sound through her, and she is sorely tempted to just drop him there.  
  
“Us, yeah, right-” He shifts forward again, forcing her to match his step, and they lurch into the sunlight and towards the next doorway, even as he squints in pain. He’s concussed at the very least, she thinks. “Pretty sure 's me they’re looking for, not you; you wouldn’t even be in this damn mess if you’d leave well alone. But you don’t, do you?”  
  
They reach the next doorway, pausing in its shadow, and she turns to him, no longer pretending she doesn’t feel it when he relaxes in relief when they halt.   
  
“Unless, o’course,” he says before she can retort, “you’re also bringing your own assholes to the party.”  
  
She blinks. Her mouth snaps shuts. And he is watching her from the side of his eye again, eyebrow raised, the question hovering in the air between them.  
  
Oh, damn him.  
  
“I’m not the one who was unconscious in an abandoned factory,” she tells him, shortly, and he rolls his eyes so hard he winces.  
  
“No, course, you just happened to be wandering through. Pleasant time of day for a walk aint it, ass-end of the morning, especially around here?”  
  
She smiles despite herself - because he’s right, she’s hell out of decent excuses - but she isn’t going to discuss this now, and certainly not with him.  
  
“My business, Frank. But no, I haven’t stirred enough shit yet to get a hit placed on me.”  
  
“Not yet.”  
  
“Not yet, _sure_ ,” and she almost grits her teeth, “but I’m not planning on that changing any time soon. Happy?”  
  
He looks at her. Closely, thoroughly, until she feels like he's peeling her back, layer by layer.

“Sure.”  
  
And then he turns back to scan the surroundings once more, squinting at the roofs again, as if that’s that.

She bites her lip, muscling away a wave of immense _irritation_ \- at his cheek, for thinking he has any perspective, any  _right_ to judge her - and turns the tables on him. This time, she's determined to get her answers.  
  
“Who is after you, Frank?”  
  
He doesn’t look at her, at first. He shifts on his feet as if they itch and she feels each movement where he is flush against her side. She waits him out.   
  
“A few asswipes running a mule operation,” he says at last, shortly, wiping at the bridge of his nose with his free hand. He scrunches it, as if he'd forgotten the bruises slapped across it and then grimaces at the pain. “Ex-Marines. Soon to be ex-horse shit.”

She slots the pieces together and it hits her. Oh.

His fingers flutter against her shoulder again. That strange, uneven rhythm, tapping through the thin fabric of her shirt and when she looks away he starts walking again.

She thinks about that, a while.

He knows that she would add it up. Knows she’d be able to slide the scattered pieces of his past and present together; glimpse more of the story that he’d refused to tell her even back when she still knew him, when they’d stood in that blasted forest over the broken body of the Blacksmith.

 _You don’t lie to me_ , she’d said to him once. It had been ironic, considering – his omissions were as much a lie as anything else – but it never was just as simple as that, was it?  
  
“Alright,” she says, at length, and he shifts again, tugging her into a faster pace, and she lets him.

He doesn’t speak for the rest of the journey and she lets him have that, too.

 

\---

  
  
Bullets spray through the air where, just a moment before, Frank’s head had been.

She recoils from the street corner. Stumbles over her own feet, over his, as she staggers with her heart in her mouth and pulse thudding to her bones and Frank catches her to press the two of them against the wall.  
  
“Shit,” he says, succinctly, squinting at the surrounding rooftops. His gun is up and ready to fire.  
  
“Shit?” she hisses, balling her free hand into a fist to try and stop it trembling, but it won’t, it won’t, it won’t-

 “Where’s your safe house, Frank? I thought we were right around the fucking corner-!”  
  
“We are,” he grunts back, taking a last look around before pushing her back the way they came. “It’s fucking compromised. Get up – we gotta go, go-!”  
  
They get ten hurried steps from the continued staccato of gunfire before something explodes a block ahead of them, shuddering through the pavement in a chorus of car alarms and she covers her ears; feels her insides _shake_  as Frank drags her into the nearest alleyway.

“You’re alright,” she thinks she hears him say, a warm hand squeezing around her arm, “you’re alright, keep moving” - but thank god for her running shoes is the only thing that is looping through her head and how fucking stupid is that?

But she moves. They both do, hanging onto each other like sagging dolls and they stagger along as Frank fits them into alcoves and checks the corners before they cross, a final shot echoing out in the distance before the shooting at last stops.  
  
“That was my car, I think,” his voice rasps out after a moment, and it takes her another to piece together what exactly he means.

“Someone just blew up your car.” 

“Yeah.”

“They _blew up your car_.” There is panic leaching into her tone now, the same panic that is hazing into her sight but Frank – Frank is as calm as deep water, and just as fathomless.

“No shit,” he says, and all he sounds is tired.

There is pain in his voice. She recognises it, through the blood thudding in her ears, and she turns to see him he stumbling as he keeps pace with her, mouth drawn thin and pale.

Because he’s got a concussion and god knows how many other injuries and they’re being chased by maniacs with guns.

_Get a grip, Karen._

She takes a breath and winds her arm around his waist. Supports him, although arguably he's supporting her just as much and he directs them down the side of yet another building, tucking the two of them away like rats in a maze.

She certainly feels like one right now.

“Where do we go now?” she asks when she trusts herself to speak.

The look he gives her is calculating. She mustn’t have been that successful. “Where did you park your car?” he asks, instead, and she tries to muscle away her panic enough to _think_.

“A block away from that factory - the one I found you in.”

He nods.

“You have another safe house?” she presses.

His jaw works. “Yeah. Don’t know if we can get to it, though.”

She turns to him. “Why?”

He gestures crisply towards the doorway of derelict looking apartment block and they stumble towards it, hugging close to the far wall. He looks – either bemused or annoyed, she can't decide. “You want to ask questions, or you wanna get out of here?”

She flexes her fingers in his jacket. Bemused, then. “Get fucking out of here.”

He snorts. “'Was rhetorical.”

“I know, Frank. But I’m getting sick of your snark.”

His lips twitch back into an almost smile- brief but there, a glimpse of teeth and worn-in laugh lines, but then he tows her into the doorway. They press into the alcove as he peers through the door’s shattered glass.

“Need to stop here quickly,” he says, before she can ask. He’s catching on. “Fetch some things. Won’t take too long.”

She inches forward to squint through the window too, pretending as she does so that her hands aren’t still shaking. “Leave something here?”

He tries the doorknob, unsuccessfully. “Something like that.”

The door gives when he shoves his shoulder against it – against her protests, and that of his head, too, if his sharp inhale is any indication – but it opens and they slip through, Frank easing it gently shut behind them.

The building could be abandoned, in the dim light that filters through the window behind them. It certainly looks it, with its sagging ceiling tiles, the broken strip lights. The cloying smell of mould catches in her throat and she breathes through her sleeve as she scans the corridor, following the rows of apartment doors down to the unlit ‘exit’ sign and staircase at the end, scabby in the twilight.

He points the third door on the left out to her, raising his gun once more, and ushers her to the side and out of sight before he stalks towards it and forces his way inside, scouting out the room the way the police had checked her apartment before it had been pumped full of lead.

A collection of more, precisely placed but muffled thumps reach her before his blood-smeared head emerges once more, no further harmed, and mouths for her to come over before disappearing back inside.

She walks cautiously over, stepping over the woods chips from the broken-in lock that litter the threshold.

Frank waits for her in the middle of a small, squalid, three roomed apartment.

He checks the bullet clip of his gun. Slides it back in place, with a soft click that is swallowed by the damp, and looks up at her, expression unreadable.

“You should stay here while I head upstairs,” he begins, calmly. Agreeably. “Hide in the closet in the bedroom, stay low, keep that, that .380 of yours in your hands and be ready to fire if you need to – just stay put until I come and get you and say that it’s me. I’ll knock, call out. You know. But- if I’m not back in twenty minutes, you’re gonna need to head for your car by yourself and you’re gonna have to be quick. Keep an eye on the apartment tops, don’t shoot unless you have to, don’t draw unnecessary attention. Just stay smart and get out. You got that?”

It’s dark in this room as well. The sconces on the walls are out, probably have been for years, and the glow of daylight through the smudged windows casts him in a strange light, blood and dirt and a pastiche of bruises and skin.

She takes him in and taps her fingers against her wrapped arms.

“You’re going after them,” she says, without pre-amble.

His hands flex at his sides.

“Yeah. One of them," he says. She'd call him stubborn but that was seeming insufficient, by now. "Need info, ammo - no way in hell we’re getting out of here, otherwise.”

She drums her fingers again, thinking this through.

“You’re going to kill them.”

He looks at her, features shadowed in the dim light, and his hands still at his side.

“Yes,” he says, simply.

She feels – she doesn’t really feel anything, at the moment.

She knows who Frank is, what he does. She’s seen it before, in shocking immediacy: the crunch of bone, the snap of gun powder, the quick, slick slide of a knife (like slicing apples in the warmth of autumn, her lips sticky-sweet and the juice running down her chin).

She saw it in the woods that night when the blood was thick in her mouth and clotting in her hair and he’d stared at her from the foot of the cabin, a shadow banded by warm headlights, dark eyes wide and just as broken.

_I’m already dead._

She swallows. Feels the motion likes she’s swallowing sand – sees him follow it, gaze slipping to the column of her neck.

And then she looks away and the moment breaks.

 “Alright,” she says, after a breath.

She frowns at the floor. Frowns at herself.

And when she looks up he is gone, the door swinging shut behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Join me at devilbunnyking.tumblr - because I post things there that don't make it here, including bits of the next chapter ;x


	3. Split Decisions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This has to be the longest fucking day of Karen Page's life.

She'd told Frank about the closet under the stairs.

She’d spent afternoons huddled there, between the jackets and the boiler: wrapped in her mother’s shawl, wriggling her toes in the biscuit crumbs as if they were sands of some alien planet. Here, the creaking step of her father across the landing was the groan of her spaceship as it launched; the slide of his slippers on the stairs some giant monster stalking her in the wilderness, held at bay only by the quick thinking and the hiding of her flashlight.

Her father would always find her, of course. There weren’t that many hiding places in their Vermont flat, and he’d mastered the art of coaxing her out: tempting her with the tell-tale shrill of the kettle and the mug of hot chocolate it promised.

This time, no one comes.

She huddles at the bottom of the dingy apartment’s closet with the gun laid across her knees, muzzle pointed firmly at the door slats, and the silence is almost deafening, ringing in her ears alongside the thud of her heartbeat.

She isn’t sure how long she’s been here.

_Hide in the closet. Stay there until I get you, unless I don’t. Then – you run._

The minutes trickle by and there are no bullets, no gunfire, no grunts and scuffle of movement, just- silence.

Her bones creak as she shifts her feet before her and the smell of mould is thick in her mouth.

She sits there until she can’t take it anymore.

Push out of the closet, feet first, get up. Gun up, back to the wall, check the windows -the world is quiet, beyond the closet: the same smudge of daylight making its way through the dirty glass, the same mould crawling up the walls like veins of black beneath the wallpaper.

She walks into the next room with her gun raised and gripped between trembling hands and it's just as empty.

She presses herself against the wall beside the door, presses a hand against her temple, and tries to think.

Frank hadn’t come back. It’d been – she checks her watch – nearly forty-five minutes and so that meant that he was maybe dead, maybe injured, or just maybe the fuck out of dodge and he’d told her to hide there so he could run out and –

She stops the thought to force herself to breathe, pressing her fingertips hard into her skin.

Do what? Where would he go? Frank wasn’t one for self-preservation. Self-sacrifice, yes, that brutal kind of self-loathing that would see him dead sometime soon but to just _leave her here-_ it wasn't like him. Wasn't part of his 'code', as Ellison had mocked her for before, but she'd known she'd been right then and she knew she was right now.

So where had he gone?

She stares at the gun, the woodcuts around the door frame, soft and crumbly with damp.

And then she felt the possibility click into place, with a terrible kind of certainty.

He’d gone to draw them away. To take them out, throwing himself back into the battle now that she was no longer in the crossfire- with a concussion he could barely see through and so many bruises that it was a wonder he still moved at all.

She nudges the broken door open and slides through it, gun swinging towards every corner of the hallway, and finds that she is, indeed, alone.

It shouldn’t surprise her. It _doesn’t_ surprise her – it makes sense, after all, it’s _rational_ , and it fits with everything she knows of him.

It’s also fucking stupid.

She steps down the hall towards the fire exit and the door to the stairs and pushes through the latter to peer up at the ceiling and the upper levels, as if she could see through the shitty floors and collapsing tiles, see whatever stupid ass thing that Frank was doing beyond.

She's met with more silence.

She has a choice, she realises.

If she goes up, she has no idea who or what she will find. Perhaps there’s one of the gunmen lying in wait, waiting for her to make this stupid decision; perhaps Frank’s already gone; perhaps they’ve killed each other, Frank, beaten and bloodied Frank taking one last murderer out with him as he goes.

Perhaps Frank is dead (and the thought latches onto her, sinking into each heartbeat, spreading dull horror through her veins).

But if she doesn’t go, she may never know.

She looks between them, the stairs and the exit door. Silence settles into the joints of the building, not even a breeze creaking the old frame, and no one comes.

And she goes up.

\--

It is his footprints in the dust that lead her to the rooftop – spaced firmly and pressed deep, the steady step of a soldier – and it is there she finds him: half-awake and folded against an AC vent, with a man in military camouflage draped over his lap.

He stirs as she carefully slips through the door. His hands reach for a gun he no longer appears to have, leaving smears of blood against the concrete, and he peers at her through heavy-lidded eyes.

“Karen,” he rasps, a painful, low breath of a sound, as if the word has been punched out of him.

And then he shows the first goddamn real bit of emotion that she has seen from him the entire morning.

“What the _fuck are you still doing here_?”

She firms her mouth and makes her way towards him, trying to keep low as she crosses the rooftop to his side, pretending not to think about how much of a target she presents as she does so.

“The fuck are you doing?” he repeats. There is true anger in his voice, now, despite his rasping exhaustion, but she reaches him and so she crouches at his side, tugging at his coat again to check for new wounds. He flinches away. “You had the prime fucking opportunity to get out of this. Why are you still here?”

She bites her lip, ignores him as he weakly tries to push the body away and peers around the side of the air duct they are squatting behind instead, scanning the surrounding rooftops.

She knows where they are. She'd seen the factory just a couple block away as she’d crossed the roof – saw the alley where she’d parked the car, that little tucked away street squashed between warehouses and uncollected garbage bags.

She’d also seen the flicker of movement on the roof to her far right. A flash of black and grey, a shadow, edged against a chimney stack, and maybe she could agree with him on the sanity of her choice, this time. Nonetheless she takes a breath and turns to face him.

“I’m getting us out of here,” she hisses, trying sound more confident than she feels.

He stares at her. He’s been staring at her since the moment she emerged onto the roof.

“Are you insane?” he croaks, eventually.

He sounds exasperated and angry and bone-breakingly tired, all at once.

“Probably,” she says. Her voice is shaking, she realises. She wishes it wouldn’t. “Did you get what you were looking for?”

He snorts. “Yeah, I did. I got you a clear fucking shot of getting away. You ignored it.”

She grits her teeth and looks down at her hands. “Get anything else useful, then? Ammo? Information?”

He braces himself against the AC and starts trying to push the body away again, and she reaches to help this time, although her fingers hover just an inch before contact.

“Sure.” He grunts with the effort, the head of the dead man lolling on his shoulder. The slashed throat gapes anew, a string of bloodied saliva oozing from its mouth. He blinks pointedly at her non-moving hands. “You going to help?”

She takes another breath and muscles her thoughts away, the ones that are slipping back to the last dead man she dealt with like this (his neck soft and limp and still so warm as she’d felt for an absent pulse) and sinks her hands into the bloodied flak jacket. Together they roll the body away, pushing it flat on the concrete and there is blood smeared on her hands now, thick and cold. She tries to wipe it off on the concrete.

He gets to his feet. It’s a slow, awkward thing, his movement sluggish, his face pale as he uses the air duct to support him, and when she fits herself under his arm again he doesn’t shirk her off, features drawn in a tight mask.

He is absolutely covered in blood. It crusts from his skin in dried flakes, his clothes sodden with it, and she feels it as it begins to seep into her blouse.

“Lead the way,” he rasps, shortly, watching the surroundings, and so she does, half-dragging him back the way she came.

He slides a knife into one of his cargo pant pockets (perhaps – probably - what he used to rip through the guy’s throat) and directs her towards a small cache of weapons by the side of the roof’s entrance before they retreat into the stairwell again, a new automatic of some sort tucked in his arms. She half-expects to hear bullets ricochet off of the cement around them. Nothing happens.

They make it onto the street and to the car and she bundles him into the back seat under her coat after patching up his most obvious wounds, making him swear in the process that he won’t fall asleep (because a concussion, he has a concussion, and if there’s one thing she knows about that it’s that he has to stay conscious) and gets behind the wheel.

And then she sits there, tapping at the wheel, and tries to breathe.

She wants to take him to a hospital. But she knows she can’t, even if there was a chance an ER would even treat him – the city hadn’t forgotten the trial of the century yet, not by a long shot, and he would never agree to the risk, in any case.

She glances at him in the rear-view mirror. Frank’s crashed across the seats, a blanketed lump at the edge of her sight, but she can hear the steady rate of his breaths, his calculated pause on the inhale, one, two.

“Do you have another safe house?” she tries, keeping her voice just as steady, firming her hands on the wheel.

He doesn’t respond – and when she twists in her seat he is, shit, yes, he is drifting off, bloodied head tipped against the window and bruised eyes slipping shut.

They’re running out of time.

They can’t go to Foggy’s. To Matt’s. Matt may have the injury kits to deal with this, yes, but he was- he was out of town.

Matt was out of town.

She throws the car into drive.

And drives to Matt’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Late update is late, sorry - but I wrote an army of oneshots in the meanwhile? Extending the length of this again oops. I'm just too fond of it :x


	4. the devil in Hell's Kitchen

The drive passes in a blur. She’s hardly aware of the traffic around them, the streets they pass; she feels numb, somehow, lost between the world of her little, run-down car and the city pressing outside the windows.

There is a throbbing pain in her ears, though. And whenever she reaches to crank the car into another gear her blouse sticks damply to her side, cold and thick with another man’s blood.

She flicks her gaze to the rear-view mirror, angling it down slightly until she can see Frank’s slumped form, his face, the disaster of his bruised features as he struggles to stay awake.

Frank Castle. The Punisher, who’d just torn apart a man and held him in his arms as he’d shuddered his last.

He has smeared blood into her fabric seating. She has no idea how she’s going to get that out.

_What are you doing, Karen?_

She turns her focus back to the road. Shifts into a lower gear as she slips out of the warren of the warehouse district at last and merges with the lower Manhattan Sunday traffic, as thick and angry as it is every morning.

She sees a few cop cars careening past on the other side of the road, presumably bee-lining for the streamers of smoke that smudge the skyline behind her, curling up between the red-bricks.

_Why are you doing this?_

I’m keeping him alive, she tells herself, fiercely.

If she’d left him there, he’d have been dead even before the police found him. She knows that’s true - and so, that is why she’s doing this, she tells herself: to keep him alive, because for all that he’s done she doesn’t want to be responsible for that. She doesn’t deserve it, even if he might. She couldn’t just leave him knowing that he would die.

But no matter how many times she repeats that, the creeping horror at the back of her mind doesn’t shake; the questions remain, snagging at the gloss of her mind.

She sits there and she thinks about the corpse on the rooftop, and wonders if she’s a murderer.

Frank isn’t going to stop. He would kill again, and keep on killing – he knew that, and she knew that, and so she knows what saving him now will result in. What did this make her, then? An accessory? An accomplice? As guilty as if she’d pulled the trigger herself?

That should horrify her. And maybe it does, through the din – she is drowning in her heartbeat, the pace of her pulse in her ears, the images beyond the glass sliding by all blurred and sharp and unreal. She can’t ignore the consequences of her actions, and she doesn’t want to, and yet-

When she thinks about what she is doing and what he has done, she doesn’t exactly feel  _guilt_.

She clenches her hands around the wheel and checks on Frank in the mirror again, giving the road only a cursory glance as she focuses on the blood on his jacket, the exhaustion on his face.

He’s awake.

“Welcome back,” she says – or she tries to, but it’s more of a croak - her voice falls flat, odd even to her own ears.

He gazes at her in the rear-view. His expression is unreadable, strangely lucid - he has been fading in and out the entire car-ride, dreaming, sometimes, mumbling incoherent things at others but now his eyes are clear.

She holds his gaze. Only for a moment, before she ducks her head and turns back to the road, but it’s enough – he doesn’t have to say anything for her to know that he is wondering why she’s still here, too, why she’s doing this, after the months that have passed since they saw each other last.

“Stay low, Frank,” she says, squinting into the bright sunlight. The morning light is still jarring, still unreal, but she thinks she recognises where they are - they’re getting close; Hell’s Kitchen isn’t all that large and Matt lived slapbang in the centre of it. “Traffic's slow, but it'll just be a little longer.”

There’s no response. When she checks the rear view mirror he’s slipped beneath its angle again, the slope of one broad, bloodied shoulder all that’s really visible, his head tucked against the window and smudging red against the glass.

He’s ignored her warning. She hadn’t really expected him to do otherwise.

_Why are you doing this, Karen?_

She worries her lower lip, so hard that it bleeds.

And continues to drive.

\--

They pull up into the shadow of Matt’s apartment block.

It’s not easy to find cover – there isn’t any really, not between the main road and the floors and floors of overlooking windows - but she finds as inconspicuous a spot as she can find and switches the engine off, listening as it ticks itself into silence.

It’s late morning, by now. It’s also possibly the _worst_ time to be trying to shuffle a bloodied vigilante indoors – but she’d been hedging on Matt’s neighbourhood not having much of a community spirit (if the number of times he’d been attacked in his apartment was any indication) and the passing traffic seems too fast for anyone to really see anything, everyone too preoccupied with the last minute rush to pay the sidewalks any attention. Not far to go now. One last push.

It still takes her a minute to convince her hands to let go of the wheel.

Frank stirs behind her.

"What," he rasps, with a voice like salt grit. "Where are we?"

He pulls himself upright and the dried blood on his face cracks as he peers out the window.

She takes a breath and tries to catch his gaze in the rear-view mirror.

"Somewhere safe, Frank. I didn’t know where else to take you, but we should be fine here."

He cranes his head back gingerly to blink at the apartment blocks surrounding them, considering the smogged concrete, the barred windows, the two story billboard flashing adverts around the corner.

"This is not your place."

For a moment she wonders how he can sound so certain, before she remembers the ambush before the diner. Funny, how she'd almost forgotten being nearly shot to hell.

But he's already opened his door, pulling himself gingerly from the car and she hurries to unbelt herself and join him, shutting the door as quietly as possible behind her.

"Frank, stop,” she hisses when she reaches him, flinching as a car whizzes by. This was _such a bad idea_. “You can't go up there like this - you're a mess."

"What do you intend for me to do then?” he asks, slowly, painfully, as if dragging the words out. “Fly?" He braces himself against the car roof with a wince, unfolding one of his legs before him. He’s pulled his heavy jacket closed, hiding the white skull and the bulletproof vest but even though blood doesn’t show well on black fabric it sure as hell shows well on the rest of the rest of him.

She presses her hand to her forehead and shuts her eyes, forcing herself to breathe and think. "Alright, look," she pulls her hand away, meets his heavy-lidded gaze. "I – I have a blanket in the trunk. Let me at least, drape you in it so it covers up the worst of the blood. If you could take off your vest, too, I think that would help."

He lets out a huff that sounds like an attempt to laugh. "Y‘need the blanket in your back seat. Unless you wanna explain to the police why it looks like you stabbed someone in there."

So it does. And it looks like that because he _did_ stab someone to death, violently; but she just about restrains herself from saying that. “Fine. Then, uh-” What else did she even have in this car? He’s moving again, taking a hobbled step towards the trunk and she follows, staying him with a hand around his elbow. “ _Frank,_ please. I have a hat. A beanie. Let me get it - cover up, until we get upstairs. Please.”

He looks at her, an eyebrow raised. He keeps on looking as she takes that as a yes and skitters to the back of the car to heave her blanket and winter clothes from beneath the hoard of ammo (as gently as possible, she doesn’t want to accidentally shoot herself), returning to his side door and throwing the lot across the back with her now-bloody jacket. It’s less than artful – it looks a little like she’s been living in her car – but it works. It works. It’ll have to.

She shuffles herself back out, forcing herself to not think about the faint smears of red on the window, and hands him the beanie.

It’s a simple one. Black and red, loosely woven but, thankfully, it stretches and he takes it without comment, sliding it carefully over his head.

He looks ridiculous.

A giggle rises in her throat almost before she can catch it and force it back down. This situation feels so unreal. It feels insane.

And yet she turns back to him and offers him her arm.

“Shall we?” she asks, in a voice still not quite her own.

He limps closer and carefully stretches his arm across her shoulders. It’s heavy and warm, in a way that’s rapidly becoming familiar and it’s real; he is undeniably real.

“Lead the way,” he rasps.

\--

Somehow, impossibly, miraculously, they make to Matt’s apartment without getting caught.

It’s long. Laborious. Frank walks like a man drugged, staggering at the corners and becoming heavier with each floor they climb, and by the time they’ve hauled themselves up the stairs (neither of them dared use the elevator) he’s hardly holding himself up anymore, barely responding to anything she says.

He stumbles through the door once she gets it open (with the keys Matt had given her before he left) and sits himself carefully on the first sofa he sees, lowering his head into his hands.

He unpeels the beanie and throws it unceremoniously to the floor.

She beelines for the bathroom and starts rifling through his cupboards for a first-aid kit. If there’s anywhere the daredevil would store his medical supplies, it’s probably in the room that’s easiest to clean.

“Got any Tylenol?” Frank’s calls after a moment, voice thick with exhaustion.

“Tylenol? Don’t you want something stronger?” She gives up on the bathroom and walks to the kitchen, trying the cabinets there. It’s odd being in here again, after so much time - like the apartment is alien, strange beneath the familiar skin. She hasn’t stepped a foot inside here since she found ‘Elektra’ in his bed.

“Head injury. Safer not to,” comes Frank’s voice, as he twists his head carefully to the side and she remembers why she’s here, what they’re doing, why it’s not Matt slumped on the couch while she hunts around for a corkscrew.

She closes the cabinet she was staring into and moves onto the next.

“Try the second cabinet, left of the oven,” comes Frank’s voice, a little while later when she’s on her knees before the sink and closing each consecutively useless cabinet that little bit harder. How many plates does a blind-not-blind man need? “There should be medkits in there. Gauze. Medicine. Bring the lot.”

She pauses, and then gets to her feet.

“You’ve been here before.”

“Yeah.” He’s straightening himself out gingerly, keeping a hand on his bruised temple as he blinks against the light pouring from the curtainless windows. Even through the sunlight she can see the colours of the advertisement flash across his features. “Escorted Red back, a few times. Patched each other up.”

Her heart thuds, each beat strangely sharp, jarring.

“You know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She looks down at her hand on the counter, the bloodied fingers, splayed against the woods, and once again she feels that strange urge to _laugh_.

This shouldn’t surprise her. That Matt wouldn’t tell her about this, that Matt is still keeping things from her is _not_ surprising - but to have worked with Frank, to have seen him, _multiple times_ and said nothing is… Matt doesn’t know the extent of what happened between the two of them, sure, but he knows, he knows _enough_.

She presses the back of her hand to her mouth and computes that, for a moment.

Why keep this from her? For her protection? From who, Frank or herself?

She goes to the cabinet he mentioned and low and behold, this appears to be Matt’s medical cabinet, complete with a tub of over the counter medicines and a collection of military-issue medical kits.

“How long,” she finds herself asking, as she ferries the collection of supplies to the sink and fetches a glass of water. The cold water splashes from the glass and over her hands, running red. She hasn’t had the chance to wash the blood away. She sets the glass aside and starts scrubbing her fingers. “How long have you know?”

“That Red was Murdoch?”

“Yes,” she says, and her teeth want to snap shut behind the word. “When? Since the shit with Reyes? Or- or during the trial?” And god she sees Matt’s speech when Frank was on the stand once again in a brand-spanking new light; Frank’s reaction to it, the pleasure he’d seemed to take it in tearing the case apart.

She can see Frank on the couch on the other side of the counter as he turns away from her and sinks into the cushions, with a familiarity that should’ve tipped her off, it really should.

“Long enough.”

She snorts, not sure what she was expecting, and then returns to the sofa, supplies in hand.

Frank pulls himself up to throw back the pills. He’s careless, water catching on his lips and running down his chin, and he swipes at his mouth when he’s finished, handing her back the glass with a huff and a thanks, ma’am. She smiles, a little tightly.

He moves onto the medkit and she moves back to the kitchen.

“You and Red,” he begins, after a moment, when he’s shuffled himself against the arm rest and she’s at the sink refilling his glass. “Did you figure it out, in the end?”

The non-sequitur throws her. She blinks, frowning at the side of his head where it’s visible over the sofa back and sees him tilt his head at her silence.

“You have his keys,” he expands, gesturing vaguely towards the door, and that’s when she feels her stomach lurch. She thinks she knows what he’s getting at. “Telling, that. So. You work through your little dilemma?”

 _You – you have_ everything, he’d told her in the diner (and there’d been something terrible in his voice that night, terrible and broken as he forced her to listen and then forced her to leave) _So hold onto it. Use two hands, and never let go_.

She takes a breath, releases it slowly, and pushes him _out of her head._

“We work together on cases sometimes. There’s a story I’ve been following that could get difficult and so he gave me a copy of his keys, when he left.”

She returns the glass to him and sits on the edge of the couch, crossing her arms over her chest. He’s squashed himself into the corner, the contents of the medkit strewn out across his lap. His socks are grey. It’s surprisingly banal.

He grunts, disbelievingly. “Okay.”

“Yes, ‘okay’,” she says, a little too fast and a little too sharp and she has to stop herself, look away. She taps her fingers against her elbow. “He lies, remember?”

“Right,” he says, very agreeably. “So you’ve said.”

She bites her lip and makes herself shake it off.

She moves back into the kitchen to grab some more things, she doesn’t really care what, and leaves him to his medkit and his couch.

“If you already knew about Matt, then,” she asks, after another moment. The topic change is obvious, but it feels like everything she does around Frank is obvious. She suddenly feels very, very tired. “Is that why you agreed to let us take the case?”

He snorts. He tips his head against the sofa cushions, his growing-out military crop still matted with dirt and blood and she hopes, for Matt’s sake, that he leaves a stain.

“No. Didn’t give a shit ‘bout that.”

It’s the confirmation she needed and it changed everything and yet nothing at all.

Because he was right, wasn’t he? It was never about Matt. The case, the trial, the aftermath; _Matt Murdock_  was never the reason that Frank Castle had decided to start fighting again.

-

She doesn’t really know what to do with herself, now. They’re no longer running for their lives, dodging bullets and explosions or leaping into cars. What’s the protocol for rescuing a wanted vigilante? Does he want her to go, or should she stay? Does she want to stay?

She hovers awkwardly by the coffee table and watches him struggle with the knot of the hastily tied bandage they’d tossed around his arm, trying to get at the knife wound beneath it. And then she realises how ridiculous that is.

She crouches down before him and hovers her hands over his.

"Frank.” He grunts. She waits. “Frank, please. Let me help."

He flicks his gaze up to hers, scepticism clear from the wrinkling of his brow to the amused twist of his mouth. “You know what you’re doing?”

“No.” She’d trained as a lifeguard, once, but those skills weren’t precisely transferable. “You can walk me through it, though, can’t you?”

He looks at her. She can’t read his expression – she can never read his expression – but beneath her hands she feels his fingers twitch. She’s not sure she's ever been this close to him before. Not close enough to see him, really see him, beneath the exhaustion and the bruises. He has the lightest trace of bone pressed around the hollows of his eyes, she discovers.

He moves his hands away and gestures for her to go ahead. “Okay then,” he says, after a breath.

They remain on the sofa together like that for the next hour as he talks her through the stitches in the crown of his head and his bicep. As he lets her help him wrestle away his coat and vest so they can look at the bruises wrapped around his ribs, like purple fingers splayed beneath the skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The amount of times I rewROTE THAT PENULTIMATE SCENE my god. I changed my mind mid-way through about how I wanted to go about it, and trying to reconcile the new changes took... x_x Everyone please go and thank the amazing ejunkiet for helping me and putting up with the many, many drafts and all the inarticulate screaming I sent her way. She is a lifesaver.
> 
> I really, really should’t update this for another three weeks, because my exams are around the corner, but I can tell you I will probably be working on the next chapter at least in my down time. Because these guys are still my jam.
> 
> The entire Lord Huron ‘strange trails’ album is my inspiration for this fic, just so you know. :’) Currently: ‘Take Me Back to the Night We Met’


	5. Unravelled

“We gonna talk about why you were in that warehouse?” he begins, conversationally, as she presses the needle through his skin.

She shudders a laugh, stopping when it threatens to shake her already trembling hands. She ties off the knot before she speaks. “You’re going to ask me now, Frank? While I’m sewing you up?”

“Figured you couldn’t make things much worse up there,” he replies, barely flinching as she pinches his scalp together for the next stitch, and she bites her lip. She’d had to cut his hair around the gash with a pair of kitchen scissors; the effect was not exactly _becoming_.

“We can still call Matt’s nurse friend, you know. I presume you’ve met her?” The _since you and Matt are so familiar_ goes unspoken and he lets out a little rasp of a laugh, unflinching when she pushes the needle in.

“No need to bother Ms Temple, no,” he confirms. “’M sure she’s got enough on her hands today.”

And that evokes the memory of why he’d been half-conscious in the warehouse to begin with, the military contacts he’d been chasing – if she turned on the TV, what carnage would she see filling the airways? Her hands falter, for a second, before she finishes pulling the thread through, going through the motions of knotting and snipping it off. She doesn’t need the reminder – she knows who he is.

He wrinkles his nose, as if sensing where her thoughts have drifted. “And like I said, can’t fuck me up much more up there, right? I’ve got a thick skull.”

She gets the feeling he’s been trying to distract her, trying to ease her discomfort, despite the fact that he’s the one getting stitched back together.

“Might be worth it, anyway, Frank. You do have a concussion." She returns down at the suture kit, poking at the little bandages there. Her hands are bloody again. She tries not to look at them. "That’s normally something you get proper medical help for, not just a reporter who’s a hand at cross-stitch.”

He blinks up at her at that, and she sees a smile pulling at his lips. Shit. “Stitching like, flowers and shit?” He laughs, a little genuine sound and she focuses on the needle, pretending not to notice the blush creeping up her neck. “Pretty domestic, Page. Wasn’t sure you had it in you.”

“And what’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Nothin’.” He keeps his head where she tilts it, watching her out of the side of his eyes. “Just a tad hard to reconcile with the reporter poking around factories abandoned a decade ago. Nice outfit today, by the way.”

She snorts, as if it could hide her embarrassment. “The Punisher has an opinion on my sneakers, now?”

“Nothing against practicality.” He lets her complete the stitch, gaze flicking around the room, casing it again; force of habit, she thinks and they fall back into silence as she ties off the thread.

“Guessing the warehouse gig, it’s not something that Red knows about?” he asks, after a moment.

She could lie. It’s not worth it.

“Why,” she says instead, squinting at the wound. This should be the last one. “Are you going to tell him?”

She means it as a tease, a challenge, but it falls a little flatter than she intended. All she sounds - is tired, an all-too-real glimpse at the exhaustion clinging to her bones.

“Nah. You can handle yourself. Not my business.”

She glances down at that, as if expecting a lie, but he’s looking towards the window again - as if he wasn’t the first of the vigilantes in her life to acknowledge that she was an adult who could make her own decisions.

“You’re right,” she says, primly, after a moment. “It’s not your business.” He huffs the expected laugh, tilting his head at her direction and she goes in for the last stitch.

Her case isn’t really a secret. For all she knows, he’s already got a bead on it; already traced the exact trail of corruption she has been tracking through one of the construction companies that filled Union Allied’s released contracts. Nonetheless, risks be damned,  _this -_  this belongs to her. Her case, her mess. She'll handle it herself.

She pushes the needle through and ties off the last knot, and it's then she realises that her hands are no longer shaking.

His ploy worked. She’s not sure how to feel about that.

\--

“You’ve stopped asking me to leave,” she observes, when she sits back on her heels. There is a respectful distance established between them once more: the stretch of the sofa, damp and messy as it is. There could almost be a new, thin red line of hospital tape stretched between them again 

He snorts, lightly, leaning back as well. The gauze is already staining pink but for the time being, at least, she thinks it'll hold. “Would you have left if I did?”

Of course not. Her lips twist into a wry smile.  “No.”

“There you go, then.” He rolls his shoulders, wincing as he tugs at the stitches in his bicep, the ones they’d done first since he was actually still bleeding there. “‘Sides. The damage is already done, isn’t it?”

The thought should be sobering. _You’ve already thrust yourself into the thick of it, revealed yourself to all and sundry_ is what he means - but ‘ _is it?’_  is what she thinks and the question catches on her tongue almost before she can stop it.

She bites her lip and the words away. He’s not looking at her, he’s moved on, frowning down at his front as he picks at the ruined, glued edges of his shirt and so she sets the bowl and washcloth aside on the coffee table, squashing the last of the impulse with it.

“Shut up, Frank,” is all she says and he shakes as he chuckles, another one of those little, inadvertent laughs of his.

\--

When they finally succeed in cutting his shirt away, she can't restrain her startled gasp.

Frank Castle's flesh is a litany to disaster.

She sketches the shapes of his ribs. The bruise that's shaped like a mallet head, a boot print – there are more prayers and oaths littered about him then she can count, more scars than she could put weapons to. How many are from Hell’s Kitchen, she wonders? How many wars does he carry on his skin? Her fingertips trail from burn to bullet wound, the uneven line grazing along his side. Here he is, the man beneath the armour and the bruises.

He is not fragile. She doesn’t think he could be, even stripped down: he has this easy strength about him, that potential for violence corded into every inch. He has honed himself into something sharp.

But human.

Their knees touch, just barely, bandages unravelling forgotten in her lap, and her fingers trace the humanity of his broken skin.

He moves beneath her hand, shrugging off the remains of his shirt, and that should be her cue to draw away, she thinks.

She doesn’t.

And it's funny: because right here, in this moment, is the first time the entire day she’s felt as if she had some semblance of control.

“Karen.”

It feels like a warning. His eyes are shadowed when she meets his gaze, expression unreadable and to be honest she’s not really sure what she’s doing, or why, but she doesn’t move and he doesn’t push her away. Somehow, that’s all that matters.

The coffee maker chimes in the other room. Coffee, gunpowder, plaster dust; these past few months, it’s just reminded her of him.

“I should get that,” she says, after a moment.

“You should,” he agrees, and she feels his voice more than she hears it, the rumble in his chest against her fingertips.

"I should go," he says, after another beat.

They look at each other, unmoving. Her gaze moves from the scratchpad of scars and scrapes to the red of his mouth. 

"You probably should.”

But her fingertips follow the curve of his ribs inwards, slipping into the dip of his sternum and she feels his breath catch.

"Do you want to leave?" 

"No,” he rasps, and his voice is quiet. “No, I don’t.”

She firms her touch, pressing her palm to his heart beat and he lets her.

“Good,” she breathes.

She smooths her hands up past his collarbone, his neck, running her fingers through the short hair of his nape and he lets her do that too, lets out an exhale that’s slow and shaky.

And then he leans across the distance between them, carding a hand through her hair and pulling her into a kiss.

It’s gentle, chaste. His lips are chapped, rough where the bottom lip is split, and she tastes blood when he draws away, his eyes wide, searching. He looks more vulnerable than she has ever seen him.

She licks her lips, tastes blood again. He tracks the movement, pupils blown and gaze darkening and then she tugs on him and he meets her halfway, a small sound leaving him as he pulls her into the cage of his arms.

And this time is anything but chaste.

She breathes him in. The heat and the taste of him, the brands of his fingers digging into her sides, the soft savagery of his mouth. He presses closer and she arches back, a hand falling to his shoulder and holding tight, for balance or for sanity, she’s not sure and there is something fervent in the way he touches her. Something aching, unravelled, and she wonders how long it’s been since he’s been touched like this, like he is someone who deserves to be handled gently.

He pulls back far enough to rest his forehead against hers and she follows, lips burning as his exhale breaks between them.

And then he pulls away.

He releases her, looking down, staring at his hands as he places them his lap and a pain she recognises twists in her chest as she sees him ball them into tight, precise fists. He won’t look at her, and she’s not sure what she’d see if he did.

“I,” he starts, and then he stops.

He gets up, and walks abruptly to the bathroom.

She watches the door shut behind him, fingers pressed to her still warm lips.

After a minute she hears the water running, and then the shower, coming to life with a sudden hum.

He doesn’t leave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't shoot me...? :x updates ftw I wasn't going to post it yet but I thought, what the hey. Also I'm feeling uber cornered by exams and this is my stress relief :x
> 
> look the chapter count's gotten longer again...
> 
> also it's about time I updated the summary, isn't it?


	6. Luck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter! There should be an epilogue, though, so keep an eye out (and I hope you all enjoy this!).

By the time he returns, hair damp and dressed only in his bloodied cargo pants, she has placed a change of clothes and a toweled ice pack at his end of the coffee table.

He spots them he pauses by the doorway. Snorts, as he pulls the towel from his neck and that's a good sign, she thinks, a strangeness fluttering in her chest as she sits on the couch with her mug of coffee in her hands.

He picks up the shirt and gingerly tugs it on, minding his stitches.

He doesn't take the sweatpants. She supposes it doesn't matter.

“There’s coffee, too,” she says, nodding towards the mug on the kitchen counter.

He takes it and the icepack and leans back against the island, in a way that forces her to twist in her seat.

 “Didn’t think you’d still be here,” he says after a moment, pressing the icepack to his ribs.

She meets his gaze, letting incredulity filter across her features.

“Really?”

He looks at her over the edge of his mug and takes a long, slow sip of coffee.

"You shouldn't still be here," he clarifies, finally, and she lowers her mug, preparing for the argument she'd been waiting for since she'd brought them here. Except the situation was different now, wasn’t it? He’s no longer half-conscious, bleeding over all and sundry and she'd grossly overstepped, further muddling this _thing_ they had between them. She’d had fifteen minutes to think of what to say and all she had was, _I’m_ _sorry_.

But Frank forestalls any bullshit or apologies she'd been ready to throw his way by changing tact entirely.

He sets his coffee down, the mug hitting the countertop with a note of finality.

"You're like a ghost, you know that?”

She looks back up at him, frowning, and he glances up, away.

“My own personal fucking ghost, haunting me with all that crap you put in the paper. I mean, shit.” He shakes his head, looks at her again. “Your editor make you do that, or you take it upon yourself?"

"You’ve read my articles?"

 _Good_ , she wants to say; _I wanted you to_ , but the knowledge that he had still hits her like a brick to the chest.

"Yeah, yeah I have,” he says, and he looks at her from the side of his eye, expression unreadable. “Difficult to miss, when they're all about me."

She tips up her chin.

"You leave quite the trail behind you, Frank. I _am_ a reporter."”

"Bullshit," is his immediate response and she brings the mug closer again, takes a drink. "Thought I was dead to you. You were right. So why do you keep digging?"

 _Because I'm sorry that I said that_ , she thinks. _Because I meant it but I didn't mean it - I hated you but I was afraid of losing you and then I lost you anyway._

“Because someone has to remember the truth,” she says, instead. “Someone has to say more than just ‘he’s insane’, ‘he’s a monster’-”

He croaks a laugh and she shuts up, grip tightening around her mug. “That crap again? Still clinging to that?” He swigs back the rest of the coffee and then looks her in the eye, suddenly serious. “I murder people, ma’am. I slaughter them, slaughter them like the swine that they are, and I sleep just fine. I know what that makes me. I know what I am. And you, I’ve read your articles - you know that too. And so, you see-” He cocks his head and dips a little to see her better. “My question is, why the hell are you still here?”

She looks back at him, mouth a firm, ragged line.

“Why did you let me stay?” she counters.

She means more than just the patch-up job. His itchy trigger finger moves again, tapping against the countertop, and she watches it with satisfaction, with the knowledge that she can still scratch back.

“You wouldn’t leave, would you?” he says, but it’s a paltry defence and they both know it. He licks his lips. “Wasn’t in a position to make you, was I?”

“And then you were,” she rejoins, and she holds his gaze. His frown deepens.

“I don’t leave things unfinished,” he says finally.

Perhaps she should wonder at that. Perhaps she should doubt the strange sort of relief those words give her but, somehow, it feels like this is the man speaking rather than the Punisher- like she has a purchase on Frank again.

Her gaze drops to her hands.

"I'm not a loose end, Frank."

He huffs a laugh, levering himself forward to get more coffee.

“No, you’re not.”

She drinks while he pours a new cup. Their impasse sits there until he is stationed by the counter once more, the back of the sofa between them, as if it could protect either of them.

“Nothing’s changed,” he says, at length. She looks back at him. “Nothing will change, you know that? You said that I was dead to you. Let it stay that way.”

“I can’t do that, Frank,” she says, quietly.

His mouth twists and she takes a breath, breathing through the exhaustion.

“I’m not one you save, ma’am,” he says. “I don’t need saving.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m no longer trying to, Frank.”

“Y’really think that has nothing to do with why you’re here?” His finger ticks against the countertop again but he sounds as tired as she feels. His gaze flicks back to her, though. “Think you’re not still trying to find some shred of humanity?”

She can’t deny that. He gusts a breath over his coffee, his gaze turning to fix unseeingly on the far wall.

“You know, I’ve been wondering about that,” he says, after another pause. “Wondered if you had some kinda saviour complex or something, but you, you’re not like Red. Not really. You’ve done things, you know it, you’re wondering what it means and what it makes you and, maybe, you saw that in me, too.”

Her fingers clench around her mug.

“And maybe,” he continues, still looking through the wall. “Maybe you thought that if you could drag me back to your idea of forgivable, you could let your past go as well.”

He turns to look at her directly. “The thing is, see," he says, slowly, deliberately. "You can’t. What you’ve done, you were _capable_ of that - it’s _in_ you, it’s _part_ of you, and all you can do is decide whether to live with it or not. Whether to carry on or just-”

He stops, abruptly, looking at her, and it’s then she realises that she’s stood up, a hand wrapped around her mouth, the other clenched at her side. She’s shaking, shoulders tight and wound with tension. She’s not certain if she’s furious or on the verge of tears.

“Did you do research on me?” she asks, and her voice is shaking too.

He looks at her, and when he speaks his voice is still so soft. “No.”

The ‘didn’t need to’ goes unspoken.

She forces a breath in through her nose and out through her mouth and walks herself to the kitchen, refilling her mug as if that had been her goal all along. It fools neither of them.

It’s all the things she’s not been thinking about. The things that have kept her awake, gnawed at her between articles and nightmares - and it’s funny, how he can do that; how he can _know_ people and still _do_ the things that he does.

“It’s none of your business,” she says, once again.

His expression doesn’t really change, but he doesn’t say anything more, and she stares down at her filled mug. She goes to the fridge, and pulls out the milk even though she drinks her coffee black; anything to give her a moment to pull herself back together. No matter how much she told herself she’d pushed past it, it always came back to this.

Matt’s kitchen has never felt so small.

She goes to put the milk back in the fridge and Frank speaks again.

“Thank you.”

She turns around. Frank is leaning against the countertop, his hands curled around his mug. His head is bowed and she can see the pain and exhaustion straining his features, the bruises swollen and shiny from his jaw to his cheek. He speaks into his coffee.

“For your help today,” he clarifies, smudging a thumb against the mug rim. “Didn’t say it before. Should’ve.”

She leans back against the refrigerator, arms crossed across her chest, and finds herself mollified.

“You’re welcome.”

\---

She has a funny kind of luck, Karen thinks. She gets framed for murder and finds her best friends, finds a cause to believe in. She falls in love, and the firm they’ve been building disintegrates faster than she can claw back the pieces. She finds Frank Castle again, against all the odds, but now that she finally has him before her she can’t find the words, think of what to say. All the thoughts, the anger, the frustration that she has harboured these long months – they tie themselves in knots on her tongue, slipping through her teeth.

‘Did it help?’ she wants to ask, but she looks at him and she knows that it didn’t. ‘Why did you do it’, ‘how can you keep doing it’ but it seems pointless now; she knows, in some weird way; she can ask the same of herself.

They sit, and it's quiet, and yet neither of them move and she could wonder about it, if she tried.

But not tonight.

She brings her mug to her lips, and takes another sip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhh I hope I brought it together well enough - there is definitely a sequel, for all of those loose ends (nearly called this chapter just that haha) and an epilogue, sometime soon. But yes! Please, talk to me, let me know what you think or just natter with me- i love any and all feedback and have been so excited to share this, you can't imagine :x
> 
> Before I go, this chapter is definitely dedicated to ejunkiet, who was INSTRUMENTAL in helping me pull this all together. This would've been so much sadder and less fulfilling without her. :(


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